Fluke

Fluke is a way cool (IMNSHO) techno act. They are probably best known for the track Atom Bomb, which has shown up on everything from Wipeout XL to the soundtrack for The Saint. I just started exploring their stuff, and I really, really like it. Atom Bomb and one of their other more well-known tracks Absurd are on the 'hard' end of the spectrum that their music rides, but are by no means the only sort of stuff they do.

One of the nice things about Fluke is the vocals which are present in so much of their music, a rarity in techno/electronica today. Their vocal work is not only harder, edgy stuff but can also be quite melodic and a perfect accompaniment to softer tracks. This is especially true of their modified vocals, such as those in Oh Yeah off of Six Wheels on my Wagon.

I was encouraged to explore Fluke by the node for my favorite Underworld track, Rez. Give them a try! Lotsa good grooves here, too, especially on Risotto.

Fluke is an international company that makes test equipment,
both common and esoteric. Most of their equipment is in the form of
a hand held meter in a characteristic yellow-orange rubber and plastic
case that is nearly indestructable.

They also make some very sophisticated computer
network diagnostic
tools and software, including hand held packet sniffers,
network connectivity discovery tools, protocol analyzers,
cable testers
(coax, cat5, fiber, others),
NIC testers, etc.
As with their mutimeter, their cable tester goes overboard on
features.
Not only can it test for the standard things such as cable connectivity,
crossed wires, and mismatched pairs, but also cable length,
cable speed,
impulse noise, impedance,
return loss, propagation delay, attenuation,
and can detect the location of cable faults, and will automatically
detect (unexpected) activity on a live cable (such as network packets
or a phone ring signal).

Ok, if these things are so great, why doesn't everyone have one?
'cuz they're DAMN expensive! A few other companies
make meters as high quality, and many make testers that have the
standard functionality.

Nothing much was heard of Fluke until early 2001, when rumors of a new album came about. Slightly disappointingly, it turned out to be the "best of" album Progressive History X. Gathering together the best remixes of their songs from the past ten years (hence the name), it's a good place to introduce people to the group.

2002 saw the band's new single, "Pulse", a return to the Oto-era lyrical style, with a beat similar to Atom Bomb and Absurd. It's probably the hardest (and most complex) stuff they've done so far. I'll certainly be buying it as soon as I can get my hands on a copy.

Fluke remixes don't tend to be named after the artists who worked on them, instead taking a name somewhat related to the song: the remixes for Electric Guitar are all named after various types of amplifiers and guitars (headstock, hot tube, superwound, humbucker, vibrochamp, etc), and the Tosh remixes are words that merely rhyme (posh, cosh, mosh, dosh). Sometimes, though, they get named after the artist, but either "vox" or "dub" are added (Catch 22 dub and Headdrillaz vox for the Spacey and Absurd remixes, respectively) depending on which attribute it concentrated more on.

 A demo album the band did for Virgin. It's closer to the sound of Oto than anything else, and I think a progression back that way would be great. Since it was a one-off kinda thing, the only way you'll be able to get your hands on a copy is to find it on a file sharing network -- I suggest Soulseek.

Ω Bjork was so impressed by Fluke's remix that she released it instead of the original, and they appeared with her at the 1994Smash Hits winner's party.

¤ It's not actually by the 'Brothers; Fluke did all six (atomix 1 - atomix 6, plus the edits of 1 and 3, plus the instrumental version of 6 for WipEout 2097) remixes themselves. Most likely it's just a fan remix renamed so it would be listened to.

It also contained one of the best inventions ever - the BOAWJP (Bit Of AWasted Journey Pointer). The five contestants stood around it, and Tim spun the pointer. Whoever it landed at went home, simple as that.

Aside from that, the 'games' were all won or lost purely by chance - for example, the question round comprised of such delicacies as "I interrupted Bob Holness reading Jurrassic Park the other day. Was he reading page 609 or 610?". There was horse-racing of sorts, a Jeopardy-esque round (Tim gave the contestants two options, and the first to buzz in had to pick one. Then Tim put the option chosen into a pre-written sentence, and if it was correct they got points. Example: "Mike Tyson or a basketball?" "A BASKETBALL!" "A basketball bit off Evander Holyfield's ear") and a 'What's Behind The Door' round.

The final round saw the contestant competing for the BIG PRIZE. It was kept hidden throughout the show, with a cage suspended over it by three ropes. There were five questions - to win the prize, the contestant had to answer three correctly. Every one wrong, though, meant a rope was cut by Major Disappointment (the show's gimmick character, much like Debbie McGee or Our Graham). Three wrong, and the cage was dropped. Three right, and the contestant got the prize, and the title Duke of Fluke.

It only lasted one season. Which is just as well, probably - some things are best left alone. It did spawn some equally short-lived catchphrases, though - "What are points? POINTLESS!", "The more you know, the less it matters" and "What's the prize? A BIG SURPRISE!"

Ah, the wonders of the 'Random Node' link. Also, while writing the node, I came across this: http://www.qwertyuiop.co.uk/gs/atoz/programmes/f/fluke/ . It gives all the details and then some, and some quotes for this node were therefore taken from there. Hoorj!

This is going to be gross, so prepare yourself. Flukes possess disks with which they cling to their host by sucking on; they have an external cuticle rather than an epidermis in order to resist being digested by the host. These darlings usually ingest food in the way you'd expect, though some species have no digestive system at all, absorbing food through the cuticle. Flukes are usually hermaphroditic, though they reproduce sexually. One fluke can apparently produce over 500,000 embryos. And all this is giving me a creepy vision of blood-sucking fingernail-covered perverted worms.

Well. There are many orders of fluke. Monogenea are external parasites which live on the gills of fish. Digena are internal parasites, 35 species of which are known to live inside humans, often after passing through various animal hosts on their way to us. Let's see: there's the lovely liver fluke, Clonorchis sinensis, which passes through snails and fish on their way to humans, who become host to this baby after eating infected raw fish. The flukes shed eggs which pass out of the human host via their feces to begin the cycle anew; these charmers are prevalent in East Asia. There's another liver fluke too, Fasciola hepatica, which passes through snails and encysts on grasses, and which causes fatal liver rot in sheep and other herbivores who happen to munch them down. Then there's the suave blood flukes of the genusSchistosoma, common in Asia and Africa, which cause schistosomiasis by burrowing through the skin of humans and animals and lodging in the blood vessels. The delightful lung fluke of East Asia passes to humans via uncooked crab meat, settling in the lungs. Gack. In case you think this is a "third world" thing, there's a species of fluke in American lakes which causes of rash called "swimmer's itch". Better an itch than a rotted liver, though, I guess.

Fluke is also used to refer to certain species of flatfish (flounders), and to an accidental advantage or stroke of good luck. God knows why, with all those flatworms around.

The Fluke comes in a variety of alarming colors, and has a flat base that you can stand the instrument upon. Its body is, astoundingly, made of plastic, but it seems to resonate as if it were made of a high-quality wood, which makes it very affordable while sounding much like a more expensive instrument. They come with a decent travel case not unlike the sort of gig bag you'd get for a guitar for thirty or forty bucks, which also has a conveniently flat base.

When I went ukulele shopping for the first time (on vacation in Honolulu) I was approached with several very cheap instruments that sounded rather terrible, and a reasonable (+-$200) instrument which looked kind of goofy. Its plastic body scared me off a bit, but its sound was astoundingly rich in comparsion to the other ukes of that price range (or even slightly above). I was strangely told by virtually every employee in the store (which sold only ukuleles) that I'd picked out the best buy possible on the way out. I'm inclined to agree with them, even a few weeks after having made my purchase.

The only problem with the lower end Flukes (mine was $200) is that they have a shorter neck than some of the slightly more expensive ($250-$300) Flukes, which makes them sound kind of dull as you move up the neck. You can get a nice sound out of them even there, but you have to put a little more force into the strum, or use a pick (which kind of defeats the purpose of having a uke, since it just sounds like a guitar at that point, in my opinion).

Mine, additionally, had some problem staying in tune (at one point it literally unwound as I watched it), until I took a screwdriver and slightly adjusted the screws on the tuning pegs. This took maybe 15 seconds, and entirely resolved the issue. I haven't heard explicitly of this happening to other people, but it's a possibility. These are mass-produced, inexpensive instruments, so there is the potential for some minor production oversights such as that one, but overall they seem to be of an astoundingly high quality for their class.

A parasitic trematode worm of several species, having a flat, lanceolate body and two suckers. Two species (Fasciola hepatica and Distoma lanceolatum) are found in the livers of sheep, and produce the disease called rot. [1913 Webster]